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Comment by senior_james | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great that they are trying to disrupt the textbook industry. However, the industry is so large and the majority of US universities are so entrenched, it's going to be an uphill battle.

There have been many startups that attempted this and all have failed (or the VCs just wanted a payout and were bought for millions when the big publishing companies felt threatened).

It's like trying to disrupt Ticketmaster. You might be able to get a few venues over to your side, but if the artists aren't switching over, you won't get very much traction.

Universities also have no incentive to save money on software. They know that not only is there more of a demand to go to college than the supply of colleges, but that they are guaranteed tuition through the federal loans program.

If we had no federal student loan program, they would be forced to compete on the free market and all of these ridiculous prices for textbooks and software would free fall.

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I do think the textbook industry is ready for disruption, but it won't happen by someone VC funded that essentially just wants the money going to the incumbents to themselves.

The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content. Well, depending on the topic that already exists, but what needs to happen I guess is mainstream mindshare.

A lot of the $$$ in the textbook industry is just air ("Hey, basic math hasn't changed in 100 years and we haven't figured out a better way to tell the story, but anyway lets add a few fluff paragraphs and reshuffle all the exercises so students are forced to buy the new edition").

But TBH, at my university the teaching staff largely disliked the textbook racket too, and came up with their own exercises, thus allowing students to use any edition of the chosen textbook.

That being said, I'm just appalled at the poor quality of many of the textbooks from the major publishers. It's like they're selling by the pound, and thus end up with phonebook sized monsters that spend an amazing amount of pages explaining very little.

> The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content

Bingo! But there is still money to be made here.

Bundle a high quality open source textbook with tons of extra examples, auto-graded quizzes/assignments when possible, cheater detection, etc.

Provide regular updates so that Google doesn't know the answers to all the homework assignments/quizzes. Scrape the answers that are provided by google and incorporate them into the cheater detection.

Also provide a bit of analytics on top of the quiz/homework infrastructure. Or at least provide robust excel export so that instructors can figure out if there are clusters of students struggling with this or that concept.

And then sell the bundle and give some kick-back to the author(s) of the open source text (because it's the right thing to do, but also because the authors are thought leaders and will plug your product if they feel you're providing a valuable product at a reasonable price without screwing anyone).

Trying to write better textbooks than seasoned and altruistic professors is a losing battle.

One important service that the existing textbook companies provide is editing. That's the gap that seems to be unaddressed by having professors self publish.

I don't agree.

Editing for content or style?

Style editing is usually detrimental IME. Especially when the style editor doesn't understand the content and is just applying typographical rules.

And content editing is usually done by fellow professors or students. Which if the book is open source will happen anyways as new professors use the book in their courses and notice errors.

Publishers provide style, content/grammatical editing, domain experience and pedagogical review.

Most professors don't have strong backgrounds in pedagogy and even those that do benefit from having others edit their work.

With how much adjunctization stands to save universities, I doubt software licenses are even on the radar for administrators. And if you don't want to piss off the tenured faculty while trying to shut down unionization, don't tell them to cut back on the books and software.

>If we had no federal student loan program...

Not a silver bullet. How sure are you that private lenders wouldn't fill the void with higher interest loans that people would still be willing to take? There are already examples of more "creative" financing schemes like income sharing, which could certainly expand as well if the more attractive federal loans disappeared. Demand for college degrees stays sky high whatever you do.

saw an article that in the last 40 years the number of administrators has increased 400% while tenure track professors has only increased 23%. Number of students has increase 300%. They could easily cut costs but the money is there so there's no incentive

These college admins should honestly be charged criminally

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